Seasonal variations

To everything there is a season: even to the accumulation and dispersal of antique printed matter. So, annually in early June, normal bookman's display behaviour works itself up to a noisy rut, the dawn chorus of rival boasts producing a kind of frenzy. The 2003 London Book Fair week was characterised, unsurprisingly, by anxiety, tetchiness and excess. Antiquarian Book Review, which normally occupies a benign corner in an anteroom, handing out smiles and free mags, was mysteriously absent.

Simon Finch had, in his frightening catalogue "100 English books", a copy of Milton's Areopagitica bound up in a bundle of civil war pamphlets, with the stamp of the Torquay Natural History Society, a steal at £46,000. Finch also holds Milton's copy of Pascal's Lettres Provinciales, an unfindable relic and a mighty association, probably from the earliest dispersal of Milton's library, with the owner's initials.

The price of books startled old stagers, who remember when a four-figure ticket was notable; five figures, today, is a commonplace. It isn't obvious if this is because book inflation is out of kilter with any world except the stock exchange or because, more interestingly, those prices are bringing out superlative rarities that have been neglected or treasured for decades. (It was a seven-figure temptation that led Oriel to sell its first folio to the late Sir Paul Getty.)

The usual suspects were also on parade: at £100,000, a nose in front of Malthus at £95,000, the Kelmscott Chaucer, a gathering of Austens. But the most impressively modest listing is Rachel Lee's, of 1,000 books from the library of Iris Murdoch, with annotations from heavy to voluminous.

A strange feature of the catalogue is that it is entirely devoid of references to unbearable poignancy, unparalleled research opportunities, astounding insights, or any of the language of vaunting self-esteem. Lee (who has only recently become an independent book dealer, though she has been every other kind of bookperson), provides a practical preface; there is a brief introduction by John Bayley ("she had come to a place where there is no road. And then not even her library around her could help her to find it").

The censorious might only complain that Lee picks out for especial notice Oxford poems 1915, simply because it contains Tolkien's meritless "Goblin Feet", a pygmy beside the flattering presentation in Sartre's Chemins de la liberté and Murdoch's passionate but uncertain responses, Raymond Queneau's Pierrot mon ami, which she translated, or Murdoch in the margin of Heidegger; "consciousness as soup, thick or thin".

The 1,000-volume collection will cost £150,000; or you could spend that amount on a handful of books about wizards. EK